Airline Assured Flight Attendant She'd Be Safe to Fly to Mexico. When She Returned, ICE Detained Her

A dream job has turned into a nightmare for a Texas flight attendant who is now sitting in an immigration detention center and facing deportation to South America.

“It really boggles my mind why the government would want to seek to continue to detain someone with no criminal history who was a graduate of Texas A&M and who was approved and on her way to citizenship but was held for what was obviously a mistake,” the woman’s attorney, Belinda Arroyo, said in a telephone interview. “But here we are, almost a month and a half later.”

Selene Saavedra Roman, 28, a resident of College Station, Texas, had been a crew member for Phoenix-based Mesa Airlines for less than a month in February when she was scheduled for a flight to Mexico out of Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport (IAH), even though she’d already made it clear that she didn’t want to work any flights outside the US.

Mesa Airlines operates regional flights for American Airlines and United Airlines. This flight was for United.

Saavedra immediately told her supervisors she was worried — she was, after all, a so-called Dreamer, one of an estimated 700,000 immigrants to the US who fall under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy. Saavedra came illegally to the US from Peru when she was 3 years old, grew up in Dallas, went to college in Texas, and married a US citizen. She has a Social Security number and pays taxes, and was halfway through the process of getting her official citizenship. Leaving the country, she feared, could jeopardize her DACA status.

But Mesa Airlines insisted she was legally all right to fly to Mexico and back.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/airline-assured-flight-attendant-shed-be-safe-to-fly-to-mexico-when-she-returned-ice-detained-her/ar-BBV4DXe?li=BBnbfcL&ocid=mailsignout